I was on vacation when I realized I'd made a mistake.
Not a dramatic one. A quiet one — the kind that accumulates over years without announcing itself until you're sitting somewhere beautiful with the person you love most, and you realize you don't actually know how to just be with them anymore.
I'd spent so long being productive that I'd forgotten how to be present.
The Hyper-Responsible Leader's Blindspot
There's a type of leader I know well because I've been one, and because I coach many of them.
They are extraordinarily capable. They can hold more complexity than most people. They show up for their teams, clients, communities, and obligations. They are the person everyone calls when something needs to get done.
And they are often, quietly, failing the people closest to them.
Not from lack of love. Not from the absence of intention. But because they've applied the logic of productivity to their personal lives — treating everything as a resource to be allocated, every hour as an opportunity to accomplish something — the people who love them can feel the difference between being scheduled and being chosen.
The hyper-responsible leader tells themselves they're doing all of this for their family. The long hours, the sacrificed weekends, the vacations with laptops — it's all building something that will eventually make life better for the people they love. The underlying root… they are doing it for themselves.
That story is partially true. It's also, in many cases, a way of avoiding something harder: the full-contact vulnerability of being genuinely present with another person who knows you completely.
Make Time. Literally.
One of my clients is a physician. High performer in every measurable way. Her practice was thriving. Her patients loved her. Her team respected her. Her marriage, however, was on life support.
She came to coaching to talk about her business. What she actually needed to talk about was this: she was scheduled for her patients, her hospital, her staff — and entirely unscheduled for her husband.
He hadn't asked for much. He'd asked for time. He asked to be a priority, not an obligation to her.. And she kept meaning to prioritize it, in the way that people mean to do things they never actually do.
We talked about what it would look like to treat her marriage with the same priority she applied to her medical practice. She resisted the idea at first — it felt clinical, unromantic.
I asked her, “What's more unromantic? Scheduling time with your husband, or slowly losing the marriage because you kept waiting for the right time that never arrived?”
She started scheduling intimacy. Not spontaneously — deliberately. A recurring appointment protected the way a patient's appointment would be protected.
Her husband called it the best thing that had happened to them in years. It made him feel like he mattered, that he was just as important as her medical practice, and helped him support her more in her work because she met him in his love language.
What changed wasn't the romance. What changed was the signal it sent: you matter to me in a concrete, demonstrated way, not just in theory.
What Otherness Actually Means
Here's a concept I come back to constantly in my own marriage and in my work with leaders: otherness.
Otherness is the recognition that the person you're closest to has an interior life that is genuinely different from yours — desires, fears, ways of experiencing the world that you don't fully share and cannot fully predict.
At the beginning of relationships, this is obvious and magnetic. You're fascinated by who they are. You want to understand them. Their difference is part of what drew you to them.
Over time — especially in high-stress, high-demand lives — something happens. You stop being curious. You stop asking for what you want. Resentment replaces vulnerability. Partnership becomes roommates.
Long-term relationships often don't fail from conflict. They fail from a slow collapse of curiosity — partners who have stopped seeing each other as genuinely other, who have reduced each other to familiar roles, who have mistaken comfort for connection.
In otherness, there is no right or wrong, no good or bad. It is recognizing that your spouse whole person, with strengths and limitations.
The antidote to that collapse is not more quality time in the abstract. It's the deliberate practice of curiosity, acceptance of otherness, and vulnerability to ask for what you want and need, and to be willing to allow your partner to do the same with you.
I got a small lesson in this on that same vacation. One afternoon, my wife wanted to go shopping. My instinct — the honest one — was that I’d rather she stay with me by the pool. We were on vacation together. Shouldn’t we be doing things together?
But I stopped and thought about it differently. She wasn’t abandoning me. She was filling her cup. Shopping genuinely restores her. It’s hers. Getting resentful about it — or making her feel guilty — wouldn’t bring her closer to me. It would push her further away.
So I let her go. Without commentary. Without the subtle guilt that spouses of hyper-responsible people have learned to watch for.
She came back two hours later, visibly lighter. More present. More herself. We spent the rest of that evening connected in a way we hadn’t been in a while.
That’s otherness working the way it’s supposed to. Not trying to make your partner into a version of you. Accepting that what restores them may look nothing like what restores you — and that accepting that, genuinely, is one of the most intimate things you can do.
That's what I was missing on that vacation. I'd been so focused on what we were doing that I'd stopped paying attention to who I was with.
The Leadership Parallel
The same pattern shows up in leadership.
The executive who stops being curious about their team — who thinks they already know who everyone is and what they're capable of — leads a team that stops growing. The one who relates to their people as fixed resources rather than as evolving human beings creates an environment where no one can surprise them, which means no one will.
Curiosity is not a soft skill. It's an operational one. It's a key component in creating psychological safety. And it's a practice — one that gets crowded out when you're running hard and fast and treating every interaction as a transaction.
One of the things I work on with leaders is the relationship between how they show up at home and at work. The pattern is almost always consistent. The leader who avoids hard conversations with their partner avoids them with their team. The one who controls everything at home controls everything at the office. The one who can't be vulnerable in an intimate relationship can't build the trust that high-performing teams require.
You don't fix one without developing something in the other.
What I Actually Changed
After that vacation, I made a decision — actually, several decisions. And the first one was structural.
Before I could be present, I had to make sure I was actually available. On that trip, I’d set up a system: client work only in the early morning while my wife was still asleep, then laptop closed. When leads came in during the week, my marketing leader sent a simple reply: Todd’s on vacation, he’ll be in touch by a specific date. No exceptions, even when the inquiries looked promising. The point wasn’t to pretend work didn’t exist. The point was to make a deliberate choice about when and how much it would show up — so it couldn’t quietly consume the space I was trying to protect.
That’s step one, and it’s often the one people skip. You cannot be mentally present if you’re still running the business in your head. Protecting the space isn’t the work — it just makes the work possible.
Work doesn't slow down. There is always another legitimate reason to deprioritize what matters most. The key is be conscious, with boundaries and mutually understood rules of engagement with my spouse.
I started protecting time the way I protect client commitments. Not perfectly. Not without failure. But with intention.
I started practicing curiosity — asking my wife questions I didn't already know the answer to. Not as a technique. As a genuine effort to stay interested in who she's becoming, rather than relating to who she was when I stopped paying close attention.
And I started being honest about when I wasn't present — when the work had followed me somewhere it didn't belong, and when I needed to make a different choice. Like I would request a few minutes to finish what I was doing, so that I could be in the precious present for her.
These aren't revelations. They're practices. And, like all practices, the value is in consistency, not insight.
If you don't date your wife, somebody else will. Not necessarily in the way the phrase implies — but in every other way. Attention goes somewhere. If you're not providing it, something or someone else will become more interesting, more present, more real. That's not an accusation. It's just how people work.
You get to decide what gets your attention. That decision, made deliberately and repeatedly, is what a relationship — and a life — is built from.
If You Take Nothing Else Away
This is a long post. An important one, but long. So if you take nothing else away, take this:
- Set boundaries first. Presence is impossible without space. Make a deliberate decision about when work shows up — and protect everything else from it.
- Schedule the people who matter most. What gets calendared gets protected. Your most important relationship deserves the same rigor you give a client commitment — a recurring entry, not a best-effort intention.
- Be present with curiosity. You’re not trying to reconnect with who your partner was. You’re trying to discover who they’re becoming. Ask questions you don’t already know the answer to.
- Ask for help. Wanting to show up better for your spouse and your business isn’t a sign of failure. It’s a sign you’re taking both seriously. You don’t have to figure this out alone.
A Note on Getting Help
If you recognize yourself in any of this, I want to offer something that took me a long time to accept: asking for help with your personal life is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It's a sign that you're taking the most important parts of your life as seriously as you take your business.
Coaching isn't couples therapy. But the self-awareness coaching builds is deeply relational — it changes how you show up in every relationship. If what you're navigating requires clinical support, I'll let you know and refer you to someone qualified.
What I can tell you is that the work of understanding your own patterns — the ones that drive you at work and at home — is the same work. You don't have to choose between being a better leader and being a better partner.
In my experience, the people doing that work become better at both.
Start with a discovery call, or if you want to understand more about what executive coaching actually is before you decide, start there.
Your business is not the most important thing you're building. Let's make sure you don't lose sight of that.
